In the commercial food service industry, efficiency and consistency in the preparation of food products are highly desired goals. Efficient preparation lends to customer satisfaction since customers can quickly be served freshly prepared food products. Customer satisfaction is further enhanced by food preparation techniques that lend themselves to convenient control, since customers can be assured of receiving food products of consistent quality. Normally meat is cooked on a griddle by one side at a time. For example, this is the normal way to cook ground beef patties.
One technique for enhancing the efficiency with which food products are prepared concerns heating or cooking the products from two sides simultaneously. In the case of ground meat patties such as hamburgers, such two-sided cooking techniques have been found to very substantially decrease the cooking time required when compared with more conventional single-sided grilling or broiling.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,555,794 teaches an adjustable hinge apparatus for use with a cooker having multiple stacked heating plates and a support pin extending across one side of the cooker to form a common pivot axis. The hinge apparatus includes an array of adjustable hinges formed to be positioned adjacent one another on the support pin. Each hinge includes a hinge block having a pivot aperture sized for sliding movement of the support pin therein and an arm extending away from the hinge block. The arms of adjacent hinges are formed for attachment with consecutively stacked heating plates and the hinge block of each hinge is formed to slide on the support pin perpendicular to the pivot axis and independently of adjacent hinges. Thus, the hinging apparatus permits variable spacing and free floating vertical movement between heating plates, and prevents relative horizontal movement between the plates by maintaining a common pivot point for all plates in the various positions. One shortcoming with the apparatus taught by U.S. Pat. No. 5,555,794 is the multiple staked heating plates that make it very difficult for use in tight cooking spaces and a complex arrangement of heated surfaces for the operator.
U.S. Pat. RE32994 teaches an improved clamshell type grill apparatus which effectively accommodates variation in initial thickness of the individual patties of the group being cooked; accommodates a decrease in thickness of the patties that occurs during cooking; accommodates different groups of patties of nominally different thickness; and is adapted to raise the upper end of a timed cooking cycle to stop cooking by the upper platen and enable removal of the cooked products from the lower platen. The shortcoming with the apparatus taught by U.S. Pat. RE32994 is that it does not provide a self-contained apparatus for efficiently and consistently delivering a cooked ground beef patty and bun in a commercial setting.
The attempts to perfect commercially suitable two-sided cooking devices as those found in the prior art, such as for cooking frozen meat patties and pizza, have only reached limited success. In particular, the greatly accelerated cooking achieved with two-sided techniques has been found to greatly affect the criticality of the usual cooking parameters, such as cooking temperatures, cooking times, and the like. Accordingly, the consistency of preparation required by commercial restaurant establishments has heretofore been difficult to achieve when employing two-sided cooking techniques.
Thus, in order to take full advantage of the substantially reduced cooking times that can be achieved with two-sided cooking, a two-sided cooking apparatus must be configured for preparing foods in a consistent and predictable manner. Configuring such an apparatus for use in preparing different or complimentary food products such as hamburger and bun enhances its versatility. Finally, an arrangement that permits its cooking capacities to be selectively varied as the volume of business may require enhances both the efficiency and versatility of such a device.